


Puck Shall Make Amends

by Ankaret



Category: Players - Antonia Forest
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-18
Updated: 2010-07-18
Packaged: 2017-10-10 15:49:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/101445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankaret/pseuds/Ankaret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nicholas Marlow stops in Colebridge on his way home after his year on the Ark Royal, to repay a debt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Puck Shall Make Amends

**Author's Note:**

  * For [girlyswot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlyswot/gifts).



He came in through the inn door with the sea wind, a bluff, broad-shouldered sailor of nineteen or twenty, with a merry sunburnt face and a jutting blond beard cut short in the new fashion. His doublet was new, as was his short cloak. The brisk September wind came in with him, and stirred the sulking fire in the grate.

"Ale, will it be – sir?" said the boy behind the bar, the _sir_ more of a tribute to the newcomer's clothes than his profession. "Or Rhenish? If it's a room you're seeking, why, we've none here, nor have they at the Black Swan neither, not with the players in town. _We_ have the players," he added, his voice half proud and half defiant.

Nicholas Marlow laughed, and watched with deep contentment as the boy poured the ale; it was dark, almost syrupy, and smelt of the hop-harvest. He took a seat at the long oaken bar. "Nay, I'm for the London road again once I've wet my throat, and asked some directions. I'm told there's a Master Catchpole can be found at the Sign of the Pharisee down one of the alleys off the Quadrant, but I've looked all morning and seen nothing closer to a pharisee than a burning bush, and so I thought to seek help."

The boy looked suspicious, and clutched the tankard he was cleaning to his fustian doublet. The doublet was lined with cheap red ribbon, giving him something of the air of a robin that had gone into the licensed-victualling trade. Two men in sober black looked round from their conversation at a table by the door, and an old man by the hearth gave way to a fit of what might have been laughter, or coughing. This gave way in its turn to silence, save for the inconstant noise of a carpenter and his boy nailing up a makeshift stage outside in the market square.

"A friend of yours, is he?" said the boy cautiously. "Master Catchpole the bookbinder, I mean."

Nicholas' heart gave a skip, in the way that it had not in the whole year he spent on the Ark Royal, not even when she was wallowing down the Channel against a howling gale.

The suspicion of a stranger asking questions, the faces shadowed in the candlelight, the way his own hand twitched as if to reassure itself where his knife was, all of it reminded him of what he had left behind when he swung himself aboard the Ark Royal the year before. Robin Poley's face swam up horribly in front of his face like a drowned sea-ghost; and he had to tell himself yet again that this was Colebridge and not London, and Robin Poley was dead.

"Nay, I would not presume to call the man friend," he said easily, "I owe him an apology, that's all. I did him a bad turn out of ignorance, when I was younger and more foolish than I am now."

The old man gave it as his opinion that all young men were foolish, and wiped out the bowl of his pipe on the dirty sleeve of his old-fashioned long gown. The boy put the tankard down on a high shelf, and looked at Nicholas under his lashes. "He's a Papist, Master Catchpole is," he informed Nicholas. "Everyone knows it."

"And how do they know it?" asked Nicholas tolerantly, leaning his arms on the bar.

"Why, he will print nothing touching religion, and deprives himself of an income because of it," said the boy, wide-eyed at the thought of anyone depriving himself of an income, "and he cannot be a presbyterian, because he hates them worse than poison, and says they are nothing but atheists all. He beat a man from Streweminster twice round the square once for asking him to print a pamphlet giving a description of the colony at Massachusetts Bay."

Nicholas grimaced. He did not see what help his apology would be, in a situation like that, but still, an apology was what he owed Philip Catchpole, and he must give it. Along with a share of the prize that was securely sewn into a series of packets in his jerkin; a good prize, as befitted service on the Queen's flagship, and the means for Nicholas to right a wrong, if Philip Catchpole could be found and would take it.

"Still, his wife's a handsome woman," said one of a trio of red-faced men who were playing cards in a corner.

"He wed, then, did he?" said Nicholas. His thoughts skipped ahead of themselves like a stone across a sunlit pond; from Philip Catchpole and his new-discovered wife, up the northbound road to Shoreditch, and Bess.

"Oh, aye, better than he deserved, and five fine children," said the red-faced man, who seemed to be of an amiable nature. "It was her father's money bought the bookbinder's business."

The conversation turned to the man who had owned the bookbinder's shop previously and whether he had been a Jew, or had merely once been to Jerusalem, or had known a man who went to Jerusalem, or a man who said once that he _wished_ to go there; and a toast was drunk to Mistress Catchpole and her bonny brown hair. Nicholas ordered some bread and cheese and another ale. The boy told him again, unasked, that they had no rooms, but suggested he knock on the door of a widow down the street, who let out her back room when the inns were full. "She sets a good table, sir."

"I'm sure she does," said Nicholas, putting down his tankard, "but once I've said my piece to Master Catchpole, I'm for the road."

"And not see the _players_?" said the boy incredulously, puffing his chest out under its unevenly stuffed doublet as if he might be called upon to pick up a pike and defend the honour of Colebridge and its players at any moment. "They're as good as any in London. They were in Westbridge last week, and everyone there said so."

"Play?" said the old man from his seat in the shadows by the hearth. Nicholas _thought_ he remembered him, though nine years had made alterations; Will Sellars the stablekeeper's father, who had been a man of hale middle-age when Nicholas left, and now looked for all the world as if he had been a greybeard sitting by that fire since Noah was a boy. Nicholas blinked at him and called the sting in his eyes firesmoke, and thought how the world was changed. "Call that a play? A pack of fools hunting a maidenhead through a forest?"

Old Sellars paused to empty his lungs of what seemed to have been rattling in them since the defeat of the Armada; hawked the results into the fire, and returned to his matter. "A crowd of idle fools in the street watching a crowd of idle fools on a scaffold, that's all I saw in Westbridge, and the streetlings were the greater fools, for they paid for the privilege. What care I for the doings of a Duke and a lot of prancing fairies? England was better when it had no Dukes in it, nor fairies neither."

Nicholas leaned forward, his interest quickening. "What – is it one of Mr _Shakespeare's_ plays, sir?"

"Nay, how a'pox am I to know who wrote the thing?" said the old man, looking askance as if he had been asked to name the clouds in the sky. Nicholas reminded himself that this was not London, where everyone could name the playwrights, from bombast Jonson to debt-plagued Dekker. "Very likely no one wrote it, and each player put a line in as pleased him. They said it had been played in front of the Queen, God bless and keep her! As if the Queen would want to hear such fustian stuff as that. She'd have told 'em each to wed the maid in front of them and no more nonsense."

Nicholas' very blue eyes sparkled, and he ducked a grin away into his ruff. "Indeed, sir."

"Aye, indeed!" Sellars coughed again. "Now the plays they had when I was a lad, those _were_ plays, mind you. You could stand outside the Minster, or in the Quadrant or at the Cross if it pleased you, and watch them trundle by on wagons all the way round from the Creation to the Harrowing of Hell, every guild in its place, and none of them dancing about playing at fairies, for fear that God himself would smite them. Aye, and he did, once."

"Did he?" said Nicholas, startled.

"Aye, would I have said he did if he didn't? Climbed right off his rood and smote two boys round the ear for stealing fish from the Fishmongers' play of the loaves and fishes, he did. They weren't fool enough to steal the loaves, for those were plaster." The old man filled his pipe with tobacco and glared around the room. "Now that _was_ a play, and we won't see its like again."

One of the soberly-clad men by the doorway muttered that such things smacked too much of Papistry for his stomach. Sellars waxed indignant; the card-players joined in the argument, and Nicholas finished the bread and cheese, chasing up the last crumbs with an inquisitive licked finger, and paid the reckoning. One of the gamesters put him in the way of the Sign of the Pharisee; he had passed it a dozen times, but had thought it was meant for a monk.

Nicholas strolled out into the inconstant sunlight. A brisk wind chased grey clouds across the sky. A dog ran yelping across the street. A gaggle of children ran by chasing a hoop. Nicholas looked at them with the lordly amusement of a grown man of almost twenty, wondering if any of them might be Catchpoles.

He stood for a while with his hands in his pockets, watching the carpenters put up the stage. It could not even aspire to be a wooden O; it was a mere raised dais, with the poles for a curtain behind. And yet, it was a theatre, and heir and successor to every theatre that ever was. Nicholas rotated on his heels and looked over towards the roofs of the Priory and the Grammar School, the latter looking undeservedly gracious against a smudge of red-brown trees. The river was there, and the way-marker and the bridge: a hundred and thirty-nine miles to London, and sixty-one to Bristol.

Well, he had no reason to go to Bristol. But he looked at the slate roof of the Grammar School, and thought again of the merry bustling Burbage household a hundred and thirty-nine miles away; and was more and more convinced that Philip Catchpole had a better bargain in his wife and five children than he would have had without Nicholas' intervention. And with that thought, he found he might bear Philip Catchpole berating him, or breaking some tool of a bookbinder's trade over his head, with reasonable equanimity.

But first he would knock on the widow's door and bespeak her back room, if he could. It would make him a day late in Shoreditch, but he knew Bess would not forgive him if he did not stay to see the players, and tell her all about them, every detail from the lacing on Hippolyta's gown to the last steps of Robin Goodfellow's jig.


End file.
